How can Merchant Recurring Billing Help Your Company
Merchant recurring billing is a benefit available to you through many credit card processing companies. Merchant recurring billing will allow your company to automatically bill and process a customer’s payment on a recurring basis, such as for a subscription, donation or monthly membership. There are also other administrative tasks you can do with this software like send receipts automatically if you wish.
Other benefits of merchant recurring billing in addition to automatically charging your customer’s credit card every month include telling you when a customer’s credit card is close to becoming expired which will help you keep all of your own records updated and lessen the chance of a transaction not going through. You can also be quite flexible with merchant recurring billing. You can bill every 30 days, or on the same day each month, for instance on the 1st of the month. You can also fix the term you will charge your customer. For instance, you can do it indefinitely, such as for a gym membership, or if you allow a customer to make payments for merchandise, you can set it up for a certain amount of time, like six months.
Two more great benefits for merchant recurring billing is you can easily change the amount of the transaction from month to month if needed or you can change the particular customers billing type with ease, right in the same system. All of these benefits will save you a lot of time and effort, especially since you won’t be keying this information manually anymore. It can also save you a lot of money!
In most cases, merchant recurring billing is available as an add-on to your current software or payment processor account. You can usually just give them a call and add it on. Many times it is virtual, meaning there will just be an internet virtual terminal to go to. If this is the case, there is no software to buy and you won’t have to back up or maintain a database of information. It will do all of that for your right online. Since this information will be maintained online, safety and security is not as much of a concern for you, as the merchant, since all of that will be taken care of through the virtual terminal.
There will probably be additional fees in order to add recurring billing to the current set up you have. If you do not have a merchant account or payment processor, this would be a great time to get one, just make sure you put recurring billing in your package when getting a quote. Typically you will need to pay a monthly fee of anywhere from $10 - $15 to add recurring billing and pay whatever your current transaction fee is, most are $0.20 to $0.30 per charge.
As you can see there are many advantages to having a merchant recurring billing system added to your current plan. Contacting your payment processor or bank is the quickest and easiest way to get started.
